JACKSON - Republican state Sen. Billy Hewes of Gulfport did a gutsy thing a couple of weeks ago. He got a floor vote on his measure consolidating administration of Harrison County's five school districts.
Just the mention of consolidating school districts around the Legislature has for years been like the third rail of a subway track. No lawmaker wants to touch it, or they might be dead politically.
"You're committing political suicide" was the word Hewes, a four-term senator, heard from a number of his constituents when he pushed the bill. Not surprisingly, some of them were school administrators.
At least he had taken some heat off his back by a Stennis Institute study showing Harrison County could save $2.6 million in school administration costs by consolidation of administrative services.
The real surprise, however, was that Hewes' bill, even after a floor amendment virtually doomed its passage, got 29 votes, a majority of Senate membership. But the measure fell two votes short of the three-fifths it needed to pass.
With so much other business still on their legislative plate, senators decided they had given the Hewes bill its one shot and it was move-on time. So, no more will be heard of SB2713 this session.
Though his bill failed, Hewes brought into public debate the long-simmering issue of consolidating some of Mississippi's 152 school districts that many say can save money in local school budgets and improve school quality.
Education critics logically contend that it is a waste of taxpayers' money that at least two dozen school districts, each with its own superintendent and administrative staff, have notoriously few students.
Significant as was Hewes' effort, it must be emphasized that his bill would consolidate only the administration of the five school districts in Harrison County, and not change existing district lines.
The crippling amendment inserted in floor debate broadened Hewes' bill to include school administrations in all other counties where there were more than two school districts, one of which has fewer than 900 students.
That amendment meant the measure would have hit several dozen counties that have multiple districts. Consequently, a lot of senators who wouldn't have cared much about what Hewes' coastal county was up to, now had their own politics back home to think about.
Obviously enough senators to kill the bill decided not to risk touching the third rail, though perhaps deep inside they believed school district consolidation is an issue that must be dealt with someday. Just not now.
If you think 152 school districts in Mississippi is ridiculous, how would you like it if the state had 10 times that many districts?
That's how many - 1,500 districts - Mississippi had when state legislators back in 1953-1954 wrote the monumental Minimum Foundation school program. The Minimum Foundation program is still today the bedrock of the state's public education system.
After six months of grueling legislative work, lawmakers finished the program which, against all odds, equalized white and black teacher salaries and launched the first massive school building program ever undertaken. They also folded 1,500 districts into 150.
Imagine that a Mississippi Legislature, with then-Gov. Hugh White, the huge, wealthy lumberman putting his weight behind it, could enact such sweeping educational reforms - and raise taxes to fund them.
You don't have enough courageous legislators (or the gubernatorial leadership) in this day and time, when political partisanship is driving a wedge through their ranks, to make such a miracle happen in Mississippi.
Even back in that historic 1953-54 legislative accomplishment, race was an underlying factor. Race, significantly, was the chief reason majority-black Bolivar County was given (and ridiculously still has) six school districts, some with as few as 353 students.
Bolivar County was where powerful House Speaker Walter Sillers resided. Sillers was fundamentally opposed to the bold Minimum Foundation program because it would substantially upgrade educational opportunity for blacks.
Leaders of the reform movement (among them a young House member named William Winter) had to make concessions Sillers demanded in order to keep him from blocking the entire program. One Sillers demand was to have at least six school districts in his county to keep blacks happy with their own school administrators and schools and not think about going to school with whites.
One must still be amazed that Mississippi lawmakers back then would enact such a massive school building and equalization program largely benefiting blacks at a time school segregation might be outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
As history tells, the court did so hold in its Brown decision just a couple of months later.
Back to Gulfport's Sen. Hewes and his attempt to break the Legislature's cast-in-concrete attitude against any further school district consolidation.
Hewes compared Harrison County's 28,000 school enrollment with DeSoto County's 27,000 school kids. While DeSoto has only one county-wide district, Harrison has five. Of note, both have a decided white majority population.
It disturbed Hewes that the five superintendents in his county were drawing an average $106,400 salary and school administrative costs countywide were nearly $6 million. "At least we could start with consolidating school administration, and cut the cost in half," he said.
Even then under his bill, the entire county would have to approve consolidation in a county-wide referendum. As I often say, reform here comes slowly, if ever.
